context · ethics · practice
About
Rest Commons — Infrastructures of Collective Care in Extractive Landscapes — is a transdisciplinary art–research initiative based in Armenia, working in Yerevan and in regions shaped by mining and other extractive industries. It is held by Ars Techne and tended by a constellation of artists, researchers, neighbors, and the places themselves.
where it takes place
The work unfolds across copper villages, river valleys, abandoned classrooms, and shared kitchens — in Yerevan and in mining-affected regions of Armenia, with collaborators reaching elsewhere. Ecological degradation, geopolitical pressure, and economic precarity intersect here, producing exhaustion that reaches both human and more-than-human life.
Against this, Rest Commons makes temporary, shared spaces for rest, listening, and collective reflection — counter-infrastructures to extraction, where care and slowness are foregrounded as forms of resistance and knowledge.
a slow approach to transitional justice
We engage transitional justice not through legal mechanisms, but through cultural, ecological, and affective processes of repair. The project responds to layered histories of extraction, dispossession, war, and infrastructural dependency that continue to shape landscapes and bodies.
Rather than representing trauma, Rest Commons works with conditions of endurance — asking how justice might begin with the ability to pause, listen, and remain with what has been damaged. Rest becomes a political and ethical practice: a refusal of extractive temporality and a step toward reconfiguring relations between humans, infrastructures, and ecologies.
methods & forms
- site-responsive installationsBeds, textiles, low-light rooms — conditions to inhabit, not objects to view. Stillness and co-presence become aesthetic experience.
- field-based researchSite visits, informal interviews, collective listening in regions shaped by extraction. Reciprocal, situated, never extractive.
- assembliesTemporary gatherings to read, write, rest, and converse — without pressure to perform.
- open archiveAudio fragments, texts, images, environmental notes — attributed, contextualized, layered with consent.
ethics, tended
- consent before captureNothing is gathered without invitation. Stories belong to those who tell them.
- slowness as methodWe move at the speed of trust. Deadlines are negotiable; relationships are not.
- porous authorshipWe name many hands. We resist the singular voice.
- rest as resistanceTo rest in extractive landscapes is a political and ecological act.
- ecological kinshipThe land is collaborator, not backdrop.
in the community
Participants include residents in mining-affected regions, cultural workers, artists, researchers, and environmental practitioners. Engagement is open and porous — people join through assemblies, conversations, and contributions over time.
Relationships are built gradually, through repeated encounters rather than one-time interventions. Returning to the same sites, maintaining contact, and sharing outcomes transparently are central to the practice.
a decision, slowly made
Early on, we planned to integrate recorded voices from a mining-affected community into an exhibition. Participants expressed discomfort with public exposure. We slowed down. Contributors were invited to review, edit, withdraw, or restrict their materials. Some chose anonymity, others a closed archive.
The workflow was restructured around consent and layered visibility. Output decreased; trust deepened. The project aligned more closely with its values of care and accountability.
held by
Ars Techne — a slow studio for art, research, and care, founded in Yerevan by Taguhi Torosyan, curator, artist, and researcher whose practice spans installation, research-based art, and community-driven initiatives engaging ecology, infrastructure, and care. Her approach to transitional justice focuses on cultural and affective dimensions: memory, exhaustion, repair.
collaborators
Anahit M. · Nare K. · Tigran A. · Lia P. · Mariam V. · Ara H. · Sona G. · Lev B. · the river · the bees · everyone whose name we do not yet know.
"to rest is to refuse the metabolism of extraction — and to begin, slowly, the metabolism of care."
you may want to rest here
→ tend the commons with us